I have 6 side projects running at the same time. Features to build. Bugs to fix. Design ideas that come at 2am. Marketing tasks. App Store updates. Server costs to track. For a while, I used Notion. Then Trello. Then Linear. Then back to Notion. Then a plain text file. Nothing stuck. Not because these tools are bad — they're excellent. But they're built for teams. I'm one person with a laptop and too many ideas. The real problem Every time I opened Notion, I spent 15 minutes organizing my workspace instead of actually building. Linear felt like I was running a startup of 50 people when it was just me. Trello boards turned into a graveyard of cards I'd never move. I needed something that understood: one developer, multiple projects, no meetings, no managers, just ship. So I built it I spent 3 months building Project Brain — a project manager designed specifically for indie developers. The core idea is simple: Every project has 4 tabs: Features, Design, Bugs, Notes Each tab has cards with statuses: Idea → In Progress → Done That's it. No nested pages. No kanban boards with 8 columns. No sprints. What I learned building it 1. Constraints are features. The 4-tab structure felt limiting at first. But it forced me to categorize every task clearly. Is this a feature or a bug? Design or a note? That question alone saves 5 minutes of decision fatigue every day. 2. Mobile-first wasn't optional. Half my best ideas happen away from my desk. If I can't capture a bug fix idea while walking, it's gone forever. Project Brain is built for iPhone — not "also available on mobile." 3. The tool should disappear. The best productivity tool is one you don't think about. You open it, log something, close it. Done. I measured success by how fast I could get back to coding. The tech stack React Native + Expo for cross-platform mobile Firebase for real-time sync and auth TypeScript throughout Monorepo with apps/mobile, apps/web, apps/desktop (Tauri, WIP) The hardest part wasn't the code — it was resisting the urge to add features I didn't need. Every "wouldn't it be cool if..." got a hard no until the core was solid. Where it is now Live on the App Store: Project Brain ~50 users in the first month (mostly indie devs from Reddit and ProductHunt) Version 1.1 shipped last week with sync improvements The honest takeaway Building your own tools is a trap and a superpower at the same time. Trap: you can spend 3 months building a to-do list instead of your actual product. Superpower: you end up with something that fits your brain perfectly, and you understand every line of it. Would I do it again? Yes. Would I recommend everyone do it? No. But if you're an indie developer drowning in half-finished Notion pages — maybe give it a try. What do you use to manage your side projects? Curious if anyone else abandoned the big tools for something simpler.

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